I actually meant watts, because I was talking about the power being converted to electricity. Probably not right - but it made sense for me at the time:)!
Wrong. Most estimates have said that the earth can take 15 billion people fairly easily, and more if highly intensive farming methods are used. Note that these are done before genetically modified foods really became a possibility.
Remember if every person in the world was allocated a 10m^2 space, 6billion people could fit in the size of the state of Texas.
I expect by the time we have 15 billion people (if we ever do - more and more countries are starting to go backwards with their populations, and as more countries, India, China, SE Asia in general, become 'first world', they'll follow suit. It's said by the time we reach 10 billion people in 2030 that it will be the peak population and it will start declining), that we will easily have the technology to colonize other planets.
As for energy requirements, the sun puts out billions upon billions of watts every second. We can easily harness this when heavy-lift spacecraft become affordable. Fire a few kilometers of super-efficent photovoltaic arrays, microwave transmitters and get as close to the sun as possible. Boom, earth's energy needs easily solved.
I think people also underestimate how much nuclear power we have. The earth's core is huge, and powered by nuclear power. It's been going for a few million years and is still melting billions of tons of rock.
I don't know who pays $0.07 for their power. The only people that do are probably next to a large hydro damns, like Canada and NW US.
I'm in the UK and I currently pay $.10/kWh, and people in California will pay even $.20/kWh...
When I installed 1.0RC1, it found, downloaded and installed 8 updated packages. I have 3 extensions 'broke'. I am very very sure they will be updated by the time 1.0 comes out, and when the 'fox checks automatically for updates, it'll install them and when it restarts, everything will be fine.
We expect everyone to be unable to make a simple choice that 'xyz company did NOT send this, because it's not usual for them to' but at the same time expect people to be able to setup PGP or some other insanely complex public/private key system (possibly the only real way to avoid this issue entirely).
Yes, as someone said, Steel Tarrifs imposed on everywhere cost probably thousands of jobs (or at least put them in jeopardy) worldwide. Technically it's an internal issue, but it means someones family doesn't get any food on the table.
Like Sudan, an amazing integration of tribal Africa and Islam?
As for South Africa being the worlds best democracy, was it before 1994?
A continent can not survive with 20-40% of it's workforce dying. That is the fact. Did I ever say some African PHDs were worse? No I didn't. I'm not talking about your little house with your security camera's everywhere, I'm talking about the slum a few miles down the road.
Don't worry. The UK has been focussing too much on getting DSL everywhere (99.5% of the country can get it at the last count). I'm sure now that BT have nearly finished using govt money for putting ADSL everywhere, they can get to start on fiber.
Also, it doesn't help that BT's main rivals (NTL and Telewest) - or should that be only rivals -- have been in bankruptcy protection for the last 3-4 years...
Maybe you should check out a Linksys router. Especially that 802.11g wireless one. It has a 200mhz CPU and can certainly do nearly everything that a linux machine can do, especially considering it _is_ a linux machine.
Apart from the fact you will be paying a good $$$ in power costs.
Assuming $1/W/yr (which seems pretty reasonable), and assuming it uses 75W, 24/7, that's $75/year. Or you could get a $15 linksys router which would do it all nearly, and pay $10/yr in power...
Sadly, any hope Africa had in becoming a real 'developing' continent, is over thanks to AIDS. Egypt, Tunisia and some other northern countries might 'survive', but AIDS is basically like a nuke to any dreams that sub-saharan Africa has/had.
There is no way that an economy can cope with 40% of it's population (and around 60-75% of it's real labour force) being severely incapacitated, or dead. Think 40% is a bit high? It's not. Botswana will have reached that level by the end of this year or certainly next year. The really tragic thing is that before AIDS was widespread, Botswana was a jewel in Africa - one of the best growing economies.
And before you tell me that generic drugs are the solution, it's not. The current best solution to AIDS is to give people a cocktail of drugs, and keep on hoping that new ones get invented that the virus is not immune to. Sadly, that a) requires huge investment from the drugs companies, which they won't bother with if they are forced to give away all their R&D, and b) there is probably no way that even with generic drugs most people could afford them, especially now that all the 'easy to manufacture' combinations have been made and now it requires advanced production facilities, which are too expensive.
Africa is also a heavily divided continent, with the spread of Islam coming in through the north. Northern Africa is a very different place to central or southern Africa.
Sorry, but I disagree once again. 170ms is absolutley _fine_ (and that was an extreme example) for interactive responses. Maybe not for you and me (geeks), but for the 'average' office monkey, it's more than good enough.
Not only that, you can get significant speed increases. Say you want to seach your 5 million record database. You could either write a client app and run it locally, which would sometimes give better response times, or you could run it on your quad-xeon, 4GB RAM system. Which would be better - I'd rather have the Xeon box doing it for me, rather than a 800MHz Celeron.
Also, loading the client side programming (which could be megabytes in size) every time (or some of the time if it's cached) is a gigantic waste of time. I'd much prefer 1 second response times over my 56k modem plugged into a hotel room than downloading 3MB of client side programming just to do a query on a sales account.
BTW, are you saying that HTML isn't succesful when it comes to application programming? It doesn't have any more than PHP, yet it seems to be one of the most used client side markup langauges around.
The main problem with using C# and Java, apart from the huge overheads it encouters, is that you need to intermeditary code for it, and XUL doesn't do IL, not yet anyway. People need to be able to think that XUL is just HTML, but much more responsive and much more powerful. XUL should not be a drop in replacement for C# and Java, and people shouldn't have to compile it. As soon as you get people compiling it, you've lost all the goodness that it offers. It needs to be able to be wrote in Notepad, and run _1 second_ after that.
By 'directly', I mean PHP's mysql_* and.net/C# System.Data commands and controls -- something which the average programmer really does need.
No-one is going to write a full database access libary in Javascript, especially when you are talking about putting a middle layer (which would be absolutley needed to protect your database passwords), when you could just use PHP.
Ignoring the fact that the best use would be a local server where latenices are sub-ms, even over the internet (I'm in the UK, and mozilla.org is in West-Coast US, nearly right on the other side of the world):
Pinging rheet.mozilla.org [207.126.111.202] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 207.126.111.202: time=186ms Reply from 207.126.111.202: time=188ms Reply from 207.126.111.202: time=174ms Reply from 207.126.111.202: time=179ms
Sure, you have HTTP overheads there, plus PHP generation times, but they on a good machine and reasonable quality scripting are in the 20-50ms area. Nevertheless, I'm sure you could load all the important data (say 5kb - you don't need any presentation once you have the XUL loaded) in less than a second, which is certainly faster than desktop apps on a slower computer, plus no-startup time or install time.
The whole point is that you use both. Javascript is suprisingly powerful, but I agree not ideal for doing business logic in. The power of those is quite frankly, immense.
No, you tie it in with PHP and say, mySQL, and you frankly have a kickass combination. All the power of your normal widgets with the speed of development that PHP offers.
Most companies now use at least one IE (sadly, almost all are heavily locked into ActiveX atm) based app.
I'd guess that most of new big backoffice apps are being developed for the web now. The benefits are so big.
Firefox is what we should be focusing our attention on. Not Linux. Linux is at this stage a pipe dream on the desktop, at least for now. All Firefox needs to get is killer installs in the office, which I don't see too hard especially with the status of IE patching, and those tricky ActiveX issues can be got round with the use of an icon that opens IE only for that certain site and for the rest of the things, Firefox is the default.
But, I've thought this for a long time that Linux is harping up the wrong tree. Look how quickly FF has got hold - this is the sort of real changes OSS can do. However, I'm not undermining Linux's achievements in the server room. I think that is where it will get hold next.
Anyway, this is what I think we as an OSS 'people' should evangelize:
1) Use of Linux in the server room. Mail servers, web servers. Anywhere that it works. 2) Use of XUL in Firefox/Mozilla. Get Safari to support it. 3) Get BigVendor (tm) cooperation. Show them how XUL is really a lot better than using ActiveX, especially as Microsoft is really not a great partner to work with. 4) Watch as the books, tutorials etc for XUL gathers up. Watch the small developer presence increase.
Basically what we want is XUL/PHP/mySQL (a very strong combination) is to become the new VB. Once we have this, it's going to be a cakewalk to get Linux on the desktop everywhere. Then the hardware support jumps up, and boom, desktop too.
Exactly. What Apple needs to work on is pushing out their machines for much cheaper, and working on their inventory management, because at the moment it _sucks_.
Slashdot Mirror
Erm yea, but surely a 2KM long mass driver will cost a lot to build - therefore the cost of getting the stuff up there is very high.
Yes it was a typo. Sorry. I meant a 10m x 10m space, which is, of course, 100m^2.
Someone posted the calculations below... sorry about that...
I actually meant watts, because I was talking about the power being converted to electricity. Probably not right - but it made sense for me at the time :)!
Excellent idea. Surely their must be some downside to it, apart from the cost of getting the stuff up there?
Wrong. Most estimates have said that the earth can take 15 billion people fairly easily, and more if highly intensive farming methods are used. Note that these are done before genetically modified foods really became a possibility.
Remember if every person in the world was allocated a 10m^2 space, 6billion people could fit in the size of the state of Texas.
I expect by the time we have 15 billion people (if we ever do - more and more countries are starting to go backwards with their populations, and as more countries, India, China, SE Asia in general, become 'first world', they'll follow suit. It's said by the time we reach 10 billion people in 2030 that it will be the peak population and it will start declining), that we will easily have the technology to colonize other planets.
As for energy requirements, the sun puts out billions upon billions of watts every second. We can easily harness this when heavy-lift spacecraft become affordable. Fire a few kilometers of super-efficent photovoltaic arrays, microwave transmitters and get as close to the sun as possible. Boom, earth's energy needs easily solved.
I think people also underestimate how much nuclear power we have. The earth's core is huge, and powered by nuclear power. It's been going for a few million years and is still melting billions of tons of rock.
I don't know who pays $0.07 for their power. The only people that do are probably next to a large hydro damns, like Canada and NW US. I'm in the UK and I currently pay $.10/kWh, and people in California will pay even $.20/kWh...
Calm down.
When I installed 1.0RC1, it found, downloaded and installed 8 updated packages. I have 3 extensions 'broke'. I am very very sure they will be updated by the time 1.0 comes out, and when the 'fox checks automatically for updates, it'll install them and when it restarts, everything will be fine.
It will automatically upgrade your extensions in the background for you when newversions are released.
It's very easy just to set up a script on some hacked webserver and use an open proxy and you are totally untraceable.
I agree. Slashdot is confused.
We expect everyone to be unable to make a simple choice that 'xyz company did NOT send this, because it's not usual for them to' but at the same time expect people to be able to setup PGP or some other insanely complex public/private key system (possibly the only real way to avoid this issue entirely).
Yes, as someone said, Steel Tarrifs imposed on everywhere cost probably thousands of jobs (or at least put them in jeopardy) worldwide. Technically it's an internal issue, but it means someones family doesn't get any food on the table.
AKA: Within the margin of error. It doesn't matter if it's 38.6%, or 53.56% - either way it's a lot of dying people and a crippled economy.
I do doubt that any drugs can roll this thing back. It can perhaps give us some time, but any more than this is plain optimism.
Like Sudan, an amazing integration of tribal Africa and Islam?
As for South Africa being the worlds best democracy, was it before 1994?
A continent can not survive with 20-40% of it's workforce dying. That is the fact. Did I ever say some African PHDs were worse? No I didn't. I'm not talking about your little house with your security camera's everywhere, I'm talking about the slum a few miles down the road.
Don't worry. The UK has been focussing too much on getting DSL everywhere (99.5% of the country can get it at the last count). I'm sure now that BT have nearly finished using govt money for putting ADSL everywhere, they can get to start on fiber.
Also, it doesn't help that BT's main rivals (NTL and Telewest) - or should that be only rivals -- have been in bankruptcy protection for the last 3-4 years...
Maybe you should check out a Linksys router. Especially that 802.11g wireless one. It has a 200mhz CPU and can certainly do nearly everything that a linux machine can do, especially considering it _is_ a linux machine.
Apart from the fact you will be paying a good $$$ in power costs.
Assuming $1/W/yr (which seems pretty reasonable), and assuming it uses 75W, 24/7, that's $75/year. Or you could get a $15 linksys router which would do it all nearly, and pay $10/yr in power...
Sadly, any hope Africa had in becoming a real 'developing' continent, is over thanks to AIDS. Egypt, Tunisia and some other northern countries might 'survive', but AIDS is basically like a nuke to any dreams that sub-saharan Africa has/had.
There is no way that an economy can cope with 40% of it's population (and around 60-75% of it's real labour force) being severely incapacitated, or dead. Think 40% is a bit high? It's not. Botswana will have reached that level by the end of this year or certainly next year. The really tragic thing is that before AIDS was widespread, Botswana was a jewel in Africa - one of the best growing economies.
And before you tell me that generic drugs are the solution, it's not. The current best solution to AIDS is to give people a cocktail of drugs, and keep on hoping that new ones get invented that the virus is not immune to. Sadly, that a) requires huge investment from the drugs companies, which they won't bother with if they are forced to give away all their R&D, and b) there is probably no way that even with generic drugs most people could afford them, especially now that all the 'easy to manufacture' combinations have been made and now it requires advanced production facilities, which are too expensive.
Africa is also a heavily divided continent, with the spread of Islam coming in through the north. Northern Africa is a very different place to central or southern Africa.
Sorry, but I disagree once again. 170ms is absolutley _fine_ (and that was an extreme example) for interactive responses. Maybe not for you and me (geeks), but for the 'average' office monkey, it's more than good enough.
Not only that, you can get significant speed increases. Say you want to seach your 5 million record database. You could either write a client app and run it locally, which would sometimes give better response times, or you could run it on your quad-xeon, 4GB RAM system. Which would be better - I'd rather have the Xeon box doing it for me, rather than a 800MHz Celeron.
Also, loading the client side programming (which could be megabytes in size) every time (or some of the time if it's cached) is a gigantic waste of time. I'd much prefer 1 second response times over my 56k modem plugged into a hotel room than downloading 3MB of client side programming just to do a query on a sales account.
BTW, are you saying that HTML isn't succesful when it comes to application programming? It doesn't have any more than PHP, yet it seems to be one of the most used client side markup langauges around.
The main problem with using C# and Java, apart from the huge overheads it encouters, is that you need to intermeditary code for it, and XUL doesn't do IL, not yet anyway. People need to be able to think that XUL is just HTML, but much more responsive and much more powerful. XUL should not be a drop in replacement for C# and Java, and people shouldn't have to compile it. As soon as you get people compiling it, you've lost all the goodness that it offers. It needs to be able to be wrote in Notepad, and run _1 second_ after that.
By 'directly', I mean PHP's mysql_* and .net/C# System.Data commands and controls -- something which the average programmer really does need.
No-one is going to write a full database access libary in Javascript, especially when you are talking about putting a middle layer (which would be absolutley needed to protect your database passwords), when you could just use PHP.
RE: RedHat 7.3, frankly that's BS. 7.3 and 9 are very heavily used, still.
The fact that it can't communicate with a database, directly at least, is a fairly major hurdle.
I don't know where you got those 'seconds' from.
Ignoring the fact that the best use would be a local server where latenices are sub-ms, even over the internet (I'm in the UK, and mozilla.org is in West-Coast US, nearly right on the other side of the world):
Pinging rheet.mozilla.org [207.126.111.202] with 32 bytes of data:
Reply from 207.126.111.202: time=186ms
Reply from 207.126.111.202: time=188ms
Reply from 207.126.111.202: time=174ms
Reply from 207.126.111.202: time=179ms
Sure, you have HTTP overheads there, plus PHP generation times, but they on a good machine and reasonable quality scripting are in the 20-50ms area. Nevertheless, I'm sure you could load all the important data (say 5kb - you don't need any presentation once you have the XUL loaded) in less than a second, which is certainly faster than desktop apps on a slower computer, plus no-startup time or install time.
The whole point is that you use both. Javascript is suprisingly powerful, but I agree not ideal for doing business logic in. The power of those is quite frankly, immense.
No, you tie it in with PHP and say, mySQL, and you frankly have a kickass combination. All the power of your normal widgets with the speed of development that PHP offers.
Have you ever worked in a real office before?
Most companies now use at least one IE (sadly, almost all are heavily locked into ActiveX atm) based app.
I'd guess that most of new big backoffice apps are being developed for the web now. The benefits are so big.
Firefox is what we should be focusing our attention on. Not Linux. Linux is at this stage a pipe dream on the desktop, at least for now. All Firefox needs to get is killer installs in the office, which I don't see too hard especially with the status of IE patching, and those tricky ActiveX issues can be got round with the use of an icon that opens IE only for that certain site and for the rest of the things, Firefox is the default.
But, I've thought this for a long time that Linux is harping up the wrong tree. Look how quickly FF has got hold - this is the sort of real changes OSS can do. However, I'm not undermining Linux's achievements in the server room. I think that is where it will get hold next.
Anyway, this is what I think we as an OSS 'people' should evangelize:
1) Use of Linux in the server room. Mail servers, web servers. Anywhere that it works.
2) Use of XUL in Firefox/Mozilla. Get Safari to support it.
3) Get BigVendor (tm) cooperation. Show them how XUL is really a lot better than using ActiveX, especially as Microsoft is really not a great partner to work with.
4) Watch as the books, tutorials etc for XUL gathers up. Watch the small developer presence increase.
Basically what we want is XUL/PHP/mySQL (a very strong combination) is to become the new VB. Once we have this, it's going to be a cakewalk to get Linux on the desktop everywhere. Then the hardware support jumps up, and boom, desktop too.
Exactly. What Apple needs to work on is pushing out their machines for much cheaper, and working on their inventory management, because at the moment it _sucks_.